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In sharp contrast with Trump’s successful win with January’s Schumer shutdown, it looks like in the fight over the Omnibus Spending Bill, Trump found himself out Trumped by Congress. Don’t let it be said that Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan have not learned anything since the Trump train rolled into town. McConnell and Ryan finally decided to pick up Art of the Deal, and see if they could use it against the President.

Turns out they can.

The bill was a terrible bill, not because of the overspending, which is sort of built into the woodwork of a Trump Presidency. Trump, although he dislikes deficits in a general way, is not interested in slashing and burning the federal budget in the way Reagan wanted to. On the critical issue of immigration, Sanctuary cities will continue to flout the law. The bill continues to provide funding for them. And although Trump did get some money for border security, the money can’t be used to build the wall; the signature election promise of this President. If you can’t squeeze even one dollar of a 1.3 Trillion dollar spending bill to build the wall, you’re failing.

So how did the swamp win such a victory? It helped that they ignored their own rule to provide 72 hours for members to review the bill, wrote the bill in secret, and most importantly, after the bill passed the senate, immediate took a recess and left town. These bozos won’t be back for two weeks, meaning if Trump had vetoed the bill, we would have been stuck in government shut down mode until after Easter. It would have been hard to turn around that sort of media attack putting the blame firmly on Trump for weeks, with Congressional Republicans agreeing, “Yep it’s Trump’s fault.”

After praising the bill earlier in the week, Trump began to realize that he was getting hosed, and during his press conference for the bill signing today, it was obvious that he was pissed stating, “There are a lot of things that we shouldn’t have had in this bill but we were in a sense forced if we want to build our military, we were forced to have. There are some things that we should have in the bill. But I say to Congress that I will never sign another bill like this again. I’m not going to do it again. Nobody read it, it’s only hours old.”

The truth is, Trump got taken because he forgot that his biggest enemies aren’t the Democrats, but the Republicans, who are actually in charge and have power, McConnell, and Ryan. McConnell knows how to throw stop sticks in a President’s agenda; he did it to Obama for years. Now he’s throwing his considerable legislative skills against an enemy far more threatening to insider interests, Donald Trump.

Hopefully a lesson was learned by Trump to not forget who the real enemies are.

Shocker! Like every other Obamacare repeal bill before it, McCain is against it!

Senator John McCain of Arizona announced on Friday that he would oppose the latest proposal to repeal the Affordable Care Act, leaving Republican leaders with little hope of succeeding in their last-ditch attempt to dismantle the health law and fulfill their longstanding promise to conservative voters.

Who could have seen this coming?

Right leaning reaction to this has been pretty scathing, just like it was last July when McCain did exactly the same thing. My view on this is that although McCain’s no vote has zero to do with healthcare and 100% about giving Trump a big FU before he dies, in a backhanded way he’s doing the GOP a favor. The real villains in this story are the GOP leadership, McConnell and Ryan. They know what a real Obamacare repeal should be because the House came up with one in 2013, the Options Act. It was vetted by conservative think tanks and Tea Party groups. If they really wanted to “repeal and replace,” they could have used that as a starting point. Instead, they didn’t care about Obamacare repeal at all; they wanted to cut Medicaid to get funds to finance tax cuts without it effecting long term deficit projections. Reforming Medicaid is not a bad thing, but it has nothing to do with repealing and replacing Obamacare; Medicaid was around long before Obamacare. All of the GOP bills were terrible and none of them repealed and replaced Obamacare.

In terms of fixing healthcare, it seems the GOP is a lost cause. The only avenue I see is Trump taking it out of Congress’s hands and creating a Presidential commission to come up with a repeal and replacement plan. Of course I nominate my plan as a template for America’s new healthcare model.

For those of you who were really expecting John McCain to come through and vote for the “skinny repeal” senate GOP healthcare bill…

Otter’s wise words ring true. But it’s not like McCain didn’t warn you. He stated he opposed the bill when he voted to allow it to go up for debate. So I’m not mad at McCain. He did exactly what I expected him to do, preen for the cameras, virtual signal for his media friends, and toss a big FU to the Republican Party. It’s the same thing he’s been doing for years. So why the surprise?

In fact, I think McCain did the GOP, and Trump, a favor. The various GOP “repeal and replace” bills were all terrible anyway as I recounted here. None of them fixed the real problems with the individual insurance market or the exchanges. So why should Republicans get their hands dirty in a rush to get anything passed when they will own the results? And since none of their bills fixed the problem, the results will be pretty bad.

And of course, as time goes on, I’m less and less sure that the House and Senate leadership really wanted any bill to pass. It seems like it would have been fairly easy to buy off most of the dissenting senators by simply allowing the people on the Medicaid Expansion to keep their plans, as I suggested back in June. Did Mitch McConnell really think Lisa Murkowski was going to vote get rid of Medicaid expansion and reduce the federal contribution to Medicaid, when half of her state is on some version of Medicaid? How did he think she and the other senators who are from states that have a large dependency on Medicaid would vote? But if your real goal is to deliver Trump a failure, what better way than provide a sure fire failure of a bill that’s doomed to fail? Admittedly I don’t have any evidence that they sunk the bill on purpose, but if not, they truly are incompetents.

So what now? I think at this point, Trump should recognize that of the many enemies he has in DC, the Republican lead Congress is definitely part of them. And to that end, he should remove the healthcare issue from their hands. And how to do this? Form a Presidential commission to put together a health care plan, a “terrific” one which meets Trump’s criteria for a healthcare replacement bill. Nothing of Trump was reflected in the Congressional bills but this is being viewed as Trump’s failure. Taking the issue from Congress and giving it a Presidential commission removes the issue for this year, and allows both Trump and the Congress to move onto other issues. What happens when the commission finishes a Trump approved health care plan is another story, but it moves the issue from the failed column to “pending.”

Senators Mike Lee and Ted Cruz have thrown out their fix to pull the Senate Health Bill across the finish line, the “Consumer Choice Amendment.” As described by the Daily Caller:

The amendment, known as “Consumer Choice,” allows insurers to sell plans that do not follow regulations created under Obamacare for patients with pre-existing conditions, with the caveat that insurers have to sell at least one plan that adheres to Obamacare’s mandates. The proposal would allow insurers to sell cheaper plans with fewer benefits.

That’s all well and good, but it sounds like a ploy to simply get the Senate health bill passed, not to actually fix the wreckage in the independent health care market caused by Obamacare. One doesn’t have to be a medical policy analyst to see that an insurance market with one Obamacare compliant plan and all the others free of such restraints will cause a flow of premium dollars away from the one Obamacare compliant plan, making it unaffordable. Unless you have a pre-existing condition, why would you want such a plan?

So this plan doesn’t actually fix the independent insurance market, it ghettoizes the Obamacare plans. I’m unclear if the Obamacare plans become so expensive that the insurance companies have to subsidize them increasing the premiums and out of pocket expenses on every other plan they offer in the state, or if they just give up and continue the current process of bailing out of state exchanges as each state becomes unprofitable; the current “death spiral” trend. In any case, the health care market gets worse and death spirals the Republicans right out of office, leaving the Democrats to craft their own gimme-free-healthcare bill.

So what to do? Is healthcare really so intractable that there is no solution? I don’t think so, and Republicans used to understand the issue much better than they apparently do now. Republicans used to have all kinds of health reform plans, none of which look anything like the current Better Reconciliation Act.

So here are a couple suggestions that together I think would make a pretty good GOP replacement bill, but first, Republicans are going to have to come to terms with two fantasies that dominate the health care debate:

The health bill can’t be a tax cutting bill. Republicans want to get rid of a lot of the Obamacare tax increases, and it’s true that many of them were pretty poorly thought out, but we’re not going back in time to 2009, we’re stuck with the conditions that Obamacare left in the health care market and the expectations that people have from their healthcare plans. The taxes can be rejiggered any way you want, but it should remain revenue neutral.

The Medicaid cuts can’t be part of the bill. I get what the House and Senate are trying to do, and I have to raise a glass to their under cover of darkness attempt to do something about one leg of our multi legged stool of entitlements that are crushing our long term budgetary outlook. I’ve seen barely a mention in the media (too busy chasing Russian ghosts I guess) of the fact that the Republicans are trying to remove Medicaid as an entitlement program by limiting its federal contribution, pushing ever greater costs, as well as the freedom to design their own programs, to the states. But that has sabotaged doing anything else with healthcare. If that’s something that can be put down in a reconciliation bill then it’s something the Democrats can easily change the next time they’re in power, so why waste political capital on a plan that can (and will) be totally reversed with 51 Democratic votes?

Now on to the suggestions! Many of these I’ve made previously but not under a single list and probably requires a full repeal of Obamacare, but anyway…

A. Tax Credits available for purchasers of independent health insurance plans that are actually equivalent as a consumer to the employer health plans being covered by private companies. And that would be pricy, something along the lines of a $5000.00 tax credit for individuals and $10,000.00 for families. This would come close to paying about two thirds of the premium cost of the average group plan.

B. But wait you ask, that doesn’t do anything about medical inflation, that encourages people to seek out the most expensive plans they can afford with their tax credit. Not so fast… Any leftover amount from their tax credit would be rolled into a Health Savings Account (HSA). So say you find a family plan that only costs $8,000.00 per year, and then $2,000.00, the balance of your unspent tax credit, can be rolled into an HSA account to be used to pay co-pays, and deductibles. That’s a big incentive to be a smart consumer.

C. Of all of the Obamacare Mandates, the one on Preexisting Conditions is the most popular, and the one that is most likely to survive in any future health bill. I’ve already described in detail how to have pre-existing conditions paid as a secondary payer via Medicaid.

D. The other Obamacare mandates are mostly idiotic. Pediatric dental care? Come on! But none are probably more idiotic the requirement to cover “children” up through age 26. Of all the mandates, that probably had more to do with the collapse of the Obamacare exchanges than any of the others since they took the young and healthiest group out of the exchanges and put them mostly under their parent’s employee group plans. That should simply be reduced to 21 or 22. Otherwise it mainly benefits upper class kids in graduate school. However I recognize that there are constituencies for all kinds of nonsense, so to borrow from Cruz and Lee’s amendment, require that each state have one plan that has one of those mandates. Let there be one plan that really does have pediatric dental care, and if you really want that, that’s the plan you get. I think the market would provide those options anyway, but one mandate per plan, rather than all of the mandates in one plan, like the Consumer Choice Amendment has, should be affordable. Of course the priciest mandate, for Pre-existing conditions, would be applicable to all plans but wouldn’t affect the price because they would be covered by the secondary payer.

E. Of course the media and CBO crying jag over people losing their health coverage due to the elimination of the Medicaid Expansion can be avoided by simply allowing those currently under Medicaid Expansion to keep their plans. I elaborated on this back in June, but if the 14.5 million people currently covered by Medicaid Expansion know they won’t lose their plans (even if no new people are added to the program) that takes a lot of wind out of the sails of the opposition, and as I noted last month, those numbers will only decline over time.

F. There are other smaller fixes that will help things, many of which I’ve mentioned before, but are not by themselves game changers, such as:

A federal cap on non-economic malpractice damages.

Allow purchasing pools of small employers and nonprofit associations and clubs (think the Elks Club).

Allow consumer purchase of health insurance across state lines. There is some question on whether this will actually increase competition and reduce prices but hey, we allow it for employer health plans, so why not?

Allow doctors and other health providers take a tax deduction for indigent care. For some doctors, taking a deduction on the cost of service based on Medicare rates might be a better value than simply being paid for the service with Medicaid rates.

It’s not a fully realized health bill, but I think it’s a good outline that most of the right could agree with. If not this, it has to be something, and I mean something that won’t continue to wreck the health care market like the current House and Senate versions will. The clock is ticking.

I had hoped that the Senate, toiling away in secrecy, would toss out the crap sandwich of the House bill and replace it with something shiny and new that I could really get behind.

No such luck. The “Better Care Reconciliation Act of 2017” is mostly the same crap sandwich, with some of the crust trimmed off. As I wrote about the House bill last month, this bill, or something like it, would wreck healthcare and ensure Democratic ascendency, in the same way that Obamacare strip mined the Democratic majority in the House and Senate.

It’s not quite a total loss. It did move in the right direction to fix some of the problems I had pointed out in the House bill, such as restoring tax credits based on income rather than age (I never got an explanation for that). But of course it fell far short of providing reasonable tax credits.

As for pre-existing conditions, the main issue that tortured the public discussion of the House bill, the Senate appears to have just given up and is keeping the Obamacare requirement. So after all the trouble, when it comes to pre-existing conditions, it’s Obamacare after all.

Although there’s no CBO score on the bill yet, it will probably come out similarly to the House Bill since it keeps much of the same structure for slowing Medicaid Expansion and although I’ve already criticized the way the CBO score was arrived at, it won’t matter in terms of a Democratic talking point; 26 million will lose their healthcare. You’ll hear it all over cable news until the vote, then in campaign ads for the 2018 election.

How to solve this issue? Here is the difference between politicians and regular people; I can conceive of a fairly simple answer that would never occur to a professional, and it’s not one I’ve yet heard either in public policy articles or blathering about on cable news.

Consider: There are about 14 and a half million people covered under the Medicaid expansion from Obamacare. You can criticize Medicaid all you want in terms of studies on health outcomes or availability of providers, but if you’re on it, it’s free (to you). There are no premiums, deductibles, or copays. So even if you provide market alternatives to that, none of them are going to be as cheap to the patient as free Medicaid is. People being kicked off Medicaid will generate stories for years for the Democrats. There will be no end to the number of hard luck stories (and the children! Think of the children!). That will fill nightly news and newspaper stories for years to come.

So just let those people keep Medicaid.

That’s it. No complicated policy issue or complicated public/private program. Just allow the people who are currently covered by the Medicaid expansion, as long as they meet their income eligibility, keep their Medicaid healthcare. It’s not a new entitlement since it won’t be open to any new applicants; it will just cover those who currently have it. Eventually those numbers will shrink, either by people improving their lot and exceeding the income eligibility, or worst case, aging into Medicare.

Will it cost money? Yes, but frankly, the Republicans seem to be under some sort of delusion that they can turn health care into a tax cutting bill. I don’t see how that’s realistic. At some point they are going to have to realize that the bill is going to have to be revenue neutral.

More importantly, this buys time to fix what’s ailing in the individual insurance market. Obamacare has wrecked and nearly destroyed the individual insurance market and I don’t think that’s going to be fixed on the day of a bill signing. This will probably take years, so the fewer people in that market, to buy time and give reforms time to work, the better

The CBO score for the House Republican health bill came out last week and the news is “unexpectedly” bad: 14 million more people uninsured next year and 26 million by 2026. These numbers are crap of course. Not just because the CBO is notoriously wrong (remember their rosy predictions about Obamacare?) but because their comparisons are not based on reality. As the Legal Insurrection site notes, the CBO used a March 2016 baseline that they had previously acknowledged was wildly inaccurate. With health plans dropping like flies from Obamacare exchanges all over the country, if you do nothing, you’re likely to get a similar result of increase in uninsured by 2026.

But the purpose of the CBO report wasn’t to provide a statistical analysis of the possible effects of a healthcare replacement plan, it was to provide talking points to the Democrats, and on that basis, mission accomplished. And that’s why Mitch McConnell is trying to stall bringing up the healthcare bill in the Senate for as long as possible. It’s a policy, political, and PR nightmare.

But the real nightmare in the health care debate boils down to the one issue that actually frightens people, stirs them to show up to town halls, and dominates the cable news coverage of health care policy is pre-existing conditions. How to handle pre-existing conditions occupied the majority of debate on the House plan, and ultimately failed to satisfy. The AHCA has planned to handle pre-existing conditions through high risk pools. The way they are supposed to work is that people with pre-existing conditions would sign up for their health plans like normal, but money set aside in high risk pools in each state would go to subsidize the insurance companies directly for each customer with pre-existing conditions. This was based on a highly successful program in Maine. The problem with rolling that out nationwide is that we have no good way to estimate either the costs per person or the number of people involved.

Our guide to how little we know about the pre-existing population lies in an Obamacare program called the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan (called either PPACA or PCIP). PCIP was set up to provide health insurance as a bridge until the requirement for individual health plans to accept everyone, regardless of pre-existing conditions, kicked in. The assumptions were wrong both in number of enrollees and how much they would cost. The original cost estimate per enrollee was $13,026.00 and in only 11 months was upgraded to $ 28,994.00 per enrollee. And how many people are affected by pre-existing conditions? Up to 130 million people according to most government estimates. So how many were actually enrolled in the PCIP program? At its peak, there were never more than 114, 959 enrollees. So the entire US health system was re-arranged to accommodate a little more than 100,000 people. Interestingly 78% of PCIP spending went to only four conditions, cancer, heart and circulatory diseases, post-surgical care, and joint diseases.

So there is a major gap between pre-existing conditions, the propaganda talking point, and pre-existing conditions, the actual policy issue. And these lead me to notice some curious conservative commentary on the issue. Prior to the House vote, columnist Anne Coulter wrote a column about the House bill in which she made the remark, “Until the welfare program is decoupled from the insurance market, nothing will work.” But the biggest player in the conservative pundit class is radio host Rush Limbaugh. With a 20 million person radio audience, he can move or set the agenda among the right. So what are Rush’s views on pre-existing conditions? He spent quite a bit of time discussing the issue on his show after the House vote, but what caught my eye was this:

“What ought to really happen here is, the simplest way, is to take whatever the percent, 4% who have preexisting conditions and designate them as a special class who are going to have medical expenses covered by some funding mechanism that may be part of the overall bill or not, but don’t commingle these people with the genuine insurance that’s going on elsewhere. ‘Cause then we’re not talking insurance. And it does matter because that’s the way they’re able to convert this into a massive welfare bill while everybody thinks it’s insurance. It’s another sleight of hand.”

To me, it sounds like both commentators are arguing that pre-existing conditions should be handled outside the normal insurance system and covered by a government program. I think this shows a movement that’s removed from where the House Freedom Caucus is on the issue. The problem is that no one in the Republican Congress will squarely address the issue. Putting together a bill to replace Obamacare would be much simpler if they just came out and admitted that people with pre-existing conditions should be served outside of the insurance market.

In other words, a government program.

I had addressed various health reform proposals in general and pre-existing conditions in particular 5 years ago during the Obamacare court fight. At the time I addressed two major issues that needed to be in a future health reform bill:

Tax Credits and deductions to cover the costs of insurance premiums in the individual insurance market.

Some manner of dealing with pre-existing conditions, preferably by some sort of 2nd payer coverage.

I thought I would expand on just how I would cover pre-existing conditions if I were writing the bill. As stated I would pay charges related to pre-existing conditions with a second payer plan; I’m thinking Medicaid. But first, some background:

Second payers are plans that pay in addition to regular insurance plans. People most commonly run across them in Workers Comp and Auto accident issues. For example, you’re in a car accident, and are taken to the emergency room. Normally an emergency room visit and associated treatment and tests would be paid by your regular health insurance, but because you have auto insurance and in an auto accident, your auto insurance would be billed first. The auto insurance pays whatever they are contracted to pay in those circumstances, and the bill goes to your health insurance, which pays whatever it’s contracted to pay minus what was paid by the auto insurance.

Now years ago, some HMO plans would pay for pre-existing conditions, but not right away. You are a new member on an HMO plan, but you have diabetes. You could use your insurance for any medical condition except the procedure codes and diagnosis’s associated with diabetes for a period of time, either a year or two years depending on the plan. After that period was over the HMO would start picking up the costs of diabetic treatment. This way, the health plan didn’t immediately go into the hole over a brand new member who brings expensive health issues to the plan. Obviously, this isn’t great at all if you have diabetes because it means you are paying for all of your diabetic treatment and medicines out of pocket until your waiting period was over. For many however, it was better than no insurance at all.

So how would my plan work?

When you sign up for a health plan on the individual health insurance market in your state, part of the application process is identifying if you have a pre-existing condition. If so, you are automatically signed up in your state’s Pre-existing Medicaid plan. This is a secondary payer that only pays if during your first two years in your health plan (or whatever time period is arrived at) you have charges related to your pre-existing condition. So, let’s say you have heart disease as a pre-existing condition, you go to the doctor for some issue related to that, the doctor files insurance like normal, and it goes to your insurance company.

Since you’re in the first two years of your health plan with this insurance company, and the procedure codes and diagnosis codes are related to your known pre-existing condition, your insurance company denies the claim but then sends it to your state Medicaid, which processes and pays the claim. For you, the process is seamless, your insurance company gets out of paying charges, and Medicaid pays the doctor.

So, why do I think this is better than the currently proposed high risk pools in the AHCA?

First, we don’t know what the costs are going to be and who is going to need help. That was the problem with the Obamacare PCIP; far fewer people signed up than expected, but it cost way more per person than expected when they did sign up. So there are a lot of unknown costs associated with this.

Secondly, under high risk pools there seems to me a thin line between subsidizing patients with pre-existing conditions and subsidizing health insurance company profits. Are the insurance companies just going to present a bill to the high risk pools and they will just pay no matter what? Who knows? There isn’t any transparency in knowing what you’re paying for so you can never predict what the costs are.

Third, Medicaid pays out under the cheapest rates available, cheaper than Medicare and far cheaper than private insurance rates. If the government is going to subsidize pre-existing conditions somehow, why not do it in the way that provides the cheapest rates, and the most transparency? Medicaid will be able to grow a database of all pre-existing conditions, their frequency, and their costs for the private insurance market.

One way or the other, the government will be paying for this. Either the Senate puts together a plan that the President signs, or Obamacare continues to fall apart and a new Democratic Congress will be elected to fix healthcare, and if they do it, given previous experience, it won’t be cheap, transparent, or voluntary.

Rush Limbaugh was in full on denial mode today, bragging that yesterday’s election result meant that the American people soundly rejected liberalism. Nu-uh. All it means is that civic minded Republican voters are more likely to turn out to vote during mid-term elections than young people who only know about the President and not much else. Here in the State of Florida, the purpose behind John Morgan’s Medical Marijuana amendment 2 was to draw in young voters to pull in Democratic votes to put his lickspittle, Charlie Crist, into the governor’s mansion. Close, but no cigar; or more appropriately, no bong. Crist and the Medical Marijuana amendment failed by a hair. Based on an informal survey of my son’s friends, the spirit was willing, but the future time orientation for young people required for registering to vote before the deadline was weak. If it wasn’t for those darn kids…

And that will be obvious in 2016 when Republicans, who will have more Senate seats to defend than Democrats, lose the Senate gains they’ve just won. But that’s then. What about 2015?

One of the most currently divisive issues within the Republican Party is immigration. Half the party agrees with the most extreme Democrats that there really shouldn’t be any barriers to anyone coming to our shores; for different reasons of course. The Democrats want a poor, uneducated, unskilled mass that will be dependent on them and provide a reliable voting bloc for generations. The Republicans are split between death wish libertarians who just don’t see a problem with allowing 500 million foreigners to swamp the country, making it resemble Old Calcutta, and Wall Street Journal and Chamber of Commerce types who feel that worker wages are too high if they top a dollar an hour.

Think I’m kidding? A Silicon Valley tech company was recently fined for actually flying some Indian tech workers from India to the US, paying them $1.21 an hour (the same rate they were paid in India as contractors) and forced them to work 120 hours a week. That’s an absurdly egregious crime, and rather than mere fines, someone should be facing jail time. But that’s the future “immigration reform” backers have in store for all of us if they get their way.

That’s why Silicon Valley is spending so much to push immigration reform. They’ve already spent 50 million dollars on immigration reform lobbying. Why? If they get their way, it’s worth it. So it would really be a good strategic move on the part of Republicans to separate the money and lobbying of Silicon Valley from the Democrats, who want poor, ignorant vote fodder forever, and Open Borders Republicans who want declining wage rates stomping on our face forever. From the Republican Party perspective, an immigration reform bill along the lines of last year’s Senate bill 744 would split the Republican Party, perhaps permanently. Establishment Republicans may think they want to drive conservatives out of the party, but they wouldn’t like the results of a Republican Party that would no longer be able to win elections in Red States.

But there is a work around to avoid that sort of Republican Party Götterdämmerung. In 2012 the Republican House tried to get a bill through Congress that would grant 55,000 green cards a year to foreign Doctorate and Masters level graduates. It wouldn’t have increased immigration numbers since the slots would have been taken from the Diversity Lottery, one of the dumbest immigration programs ever. The bill passed the House and languished in the Senate, since Harry Reid wasn’t interested in bringing any bills up for a vote unless it was something that President Obama specifically wanted to sign.

But starting in 2015, Harry Reid goes back to the bench. With Republicans in control of the Senate and the House, Harry Reid can’t be Obama’s pocket veto anymore. President Obama will actually have bills arrive on his desk that he will have to actually make decisions on. He will no longer be able to have Harry Reid vote “present” for him.

Of course the ball will then be in the President’s court. He can veto the bill, and thereby veto something that his Silicon Valley supporters really want, or sign it, and therefore removing them from the current amnesty coalition. If Silicon Valley can be tossed a bone to get them separated from the Democrats mass amnesty coalition, it will also separate them both from the lobbying and money they provide, but also one of the phony reasons given for the need for “immigration reform,” the STEM Worker shortage myth. Republican pro-Amnesty warhorses like John McCain might recognize the trap, since the entire purpose of immigration reform isn’t really about STEM workers, border security, or anything else claimed about it other than amnesty for illegals. On the other hand, new Senate leader Mitch McConnell, who isn’t a pro-amnesty warhorse, might prefer a united Republican Party rather than one fractured along amnesty lines.